Monday, February 12, 2007

Lyrical Ratings: I Would Never Have Thunk It

As a songwriter lyric writing can be the hardest part. Many times I have the music, the chords, even the feel of the songs done long before the lyrics are finalized. They are an integral part of the song and are therefore much scrutinized.


I stumbled upon this website and thought I'd share it with you guys:

Toward A Technical Analysis Of Song Lyrics
or, "How Many Ways Does That Line Suck?"


I think this is an interesting conversation to have. We rate everything in some ways.

"Whoah! What did I just play?! That was awesome!"
"This soup is too bland, needs salt."
"That chord progression and melody sucked! I will never play that again."
"Too many cooks in the kitchen if you ask me..."

Why not songs? We certainly rate our songs, if not with actual numbers, by playing them often or putting them in the circular file after struggling with them for too long.

I have to admit that these guys are pretty wacky. They rated a Fresh MC lyric higher than a Eurythmics lyric, but these guys are pretty tongue in cheek too. If this does anything for me, it makes me think a little more about what I put on the written page.

1 comment:

John Natiw said...

Whacky. Yes. At least. Not what I would've said. This seems, to me, to be a big mistake. Trying to quantify the power of a lyric. They make some interesting points that I will remember and call upon, but wow.

Having said that, this post came along at a good time for me. I really worked very hard on the lyrics to Jesus and John Lennon. Harder than I have worked on one song before. I wrote tons of lyrics for that song. Even a bridge which I didn't record.

Once it was "done" (I had enough words written to call it a song), I re-wrote entire verses and parts of others until I was satisfied.

That's the first time I was that picky about the lyrics of a song. I think it paid off with a quality song. Which, strangely, is the point of the article you posted Steve.

Thanks,
John